Organising an Alternative University: A Reflection on the Conference ‘Critical, Emancipatory and Solidarist Endeavors’

This article by Sarah Amsler, University of Nottingham, presents a report on the international conference ‘Beyond University: Critical, Emancipatory and Solidarist Endeavors’, organised by the Kocaeli Dayanışma Akademisi (Kocaeli Academy for Solidarity) in Kocaeli, Turkey on 30-31 March 2018. At the time of writing, its organisers and many of their colleagues and students remain dismissed from their university positions and under threat of state violence and repression. They are also, however, active in organising autonomous higher education courses and research in the interest of advancing intellectual, social and ecological emancipation in Turkey and beyond. This work is important not only within Turkey but also for ongoing transnational debates about the geography and nature of struggles for a liberatory higher education, as well as the radical imagination of what else the university is and can be.